WordPress: Do Category & Archive Links Help With SEO?

[Beau]

Hi All...
Now this one has been bugging me for quite a while - Does having Category & Archive Links on your WordPress homepage (obviously linked to the right articles etc) help with SEO?

Somebody today replied to another post I made regarding WordPress and SEO and said "I don't think category and archive links on your homepage make a difference when it comes to SEO"

What are YOUR thoughts?

:-) Beaumont

[Star Riley]

Scan your site with a software and check the data. No follow versus do follow internal linking versus outbound link bleeding.

When it comes to SEO I would try to think as little as possible and just check, test and tweak everything.

[Star Riley]

Originally Posted by chane

I have always wondered about that too. It seems like it would cause duplicate content issues and cause lots of page rank link, but perhaps it is spreading page rank more? I've been doing SEO for years quite successfully. I've gone thru every major course available and I still have no idea.

To set up a test for this kind of thing would be very time consuming. I wish I was still a member at StomperNet, I would ask them.

If your using FireFox to check for dofollow nofollow links with seoquake would take seconds. I believe the serps allready are wise to Blog structure so it shouldn't be negative. The fact as far as I can see when you interlink internally it helps which is separate from the archive issue or non-issue.

If you want it is possible to eliminate archive in your code, it would be good to know how the site is ranking currenlty and what is being done to improve it otherwise. Jeff Johnson has a cool plugin that SEO's any blog.

[Jay Ang]

In my opinion, category links do play a part in SEO . Category links are useful for interlinking relevant posts internally residing on your wordpress blog.

[Adam H]

Yes i believe they do have relevance, especially if they contain good keywords , it also helps with good internal linking which intern is apart of your on page seo

[mattinertia]

I would nofollow and noindex your archive pages due to duplicate content issues and the fact that they arent going to rank for anything keyword relates.

The category pages however can be used as landing pages quite simply. Pick target keywords for all your categories and go through them one by one and add unique content to each category page - this is to "cancel out" the duplicate content of the post snippets. There's a great tutorial on adding unique content to category pages here: seoers.org/BB/wordpress/unique-content-on-wordpress-categoryarchive-pages/

[Kael41]

Categories make a HUGE difference..in my testing that is. YMMV but it goes to reason that google is scanning web pages that contain information that interested searchers might want to see. If your site is dedicated to recipes, then i think having categories focused around foodstuff's would be important.

I'd also focus on tagging btw. That's another insider secret to achieving quality traffic with wordpress. Google LOVES my tag categories on many of my sites..and it all goes back to tying in relevant terms to the subject matter of the site.

[GuruGazette]

I also love using categories, tags, and anything else that creates extra keyword/topic focused pages. They all get indexed well in search engines too.

[SummitBloggers]

We have been running tests on this subject for about 3 months. The results are a conditional yes - WordPress categories and tags do help.

I say "conditional" because you need a way to make the content unique. Just using an excerpt does not seem to work because the major search engines (especially Google) drop the category and tag pages and just index the actual posts. At least that's what's happened to us.

We modified our WordPress installation to use excerpts from different parts of the post to help eliminate duplicate content problems. Most of our posts use 4 - 10 tags and one or two categories, and they are keywords we would like to have ranked. The idea is to have the post and also tag pages ranked at the same time.

Although it's still too early to tell, this seems to be working. We are seeing traffic on the post pages as well as the tag pages. It will probably take another 6 months before we have a definitive answer, but our blogs are currently using the categories and tags to help with SEO.

Hope this helps!

[GuruGazette]

That's actually a good point and I forget that "a given" in my book may be news to someone else.

My best results come from making custom category, tag, search results, and archive theme/template pages.

On my main site for example: I have the site index as a magazine style page, the category pages show something like 150 characters of the excerpt with a thumbnail image and it's own layout style, the tags pages show I think 50 characters of content with a thumbnail and it's own layout style, the search result pages show standard excerpts and no images and it's own layout style, and my archives page uses the simple archives plugin that essentially just generates a list of links to each post grouped by years.

On all sites I usually make the index, category and tag pages slightly different in ways similar to those noted above, and I always use the simple archives. Even though I don't use the magazine style index on most of my sites I don't worry too much about it since I don't publish one category at a time. If the posts are spread fairly evenly amongst categories and tags then you end up with different mixtures of content in each section.

[InternetMarketingIQ]

What matters is what gets crawled. No crawl, no index.

[Dan.Thies]

Hey guys (hi Chane!),

Joost de Valk has a real good Wordpress SEO article here:
WordPress SEO - Yoast - Tweaking Websites

Former StomperNet Elite members, PM me if you don't have My.StomperNet access yet, k? Our database, um, sucks, but I wanna hook you up.

[rainking]

yes, they help - you want to make sure that you've got good inbound linking to your site, and these 2 things help the spiders achieve good reach to your inner pages